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Surprise Potatoes
Quarter of an hour will suffice to prepare and cook this savory surprise, once the potatoes are baked. Take three large potatoes of symmetrical size, clean and bake them; cut each in two and remove the inside without injuring the skin. Melt half an ounce of butter by the fire, add two ounces of potato passed through a sieve, a teaspoonful of grated parmesan, pepper, salt, and a tablespoonful of milk. Then stir in the yolk of an egg and presently the white, well beaten. Fill the empty potato skins with the mixture which ought to rise and puff out in ten or twelve minutes.
A potato soufflé baked back into its own skin — closer to a twice-baked potato than to a true soufflé, but it rises like one if the white is folded rather than stirred. The quantities as printed are for one filling; expect to multiply them.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe hinge: the white goes in last -- "stir in the yolk of an egg and presently the white, well beaten" means the white is beaten separately and added after the yolk. The original says stir; folding it in gently is the safer modern route to a good rise, since over-working the beaten white will cost you height.
- Quantities don't match the yieldTwo ounces of sieved potato (about a quarter cup) and half an ounce of butter will fill perhaps one or two halves, not six. Scale the filling by roughly three or four, tasting for salt and cheese as you go, and use the scooped-out flesh from the potatoes themselves.
- Weights and measuresHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; two ounces of potato is about 1/4 cup mashed. "Passed through a sieve" means a ricer or food mill — a smoother, drier purée than mashing gives, which matters for the rise.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. In modern terms: bake the whole potatoes until tender, around 400F and up to an hour for large ones, then return the filled skins to a hot oven for the ten or twelve minutes of puffing the recipe allows.
- Leave a shell"Without injuring the skin" is the practical point: leave about 1/8 inch of flesh lining each half so the shell holds its shape and doesn't split as the filling expands.
- ParmesanA teaspoon of grated parmesan per filling is a seasoning, not a cheese topping. Use the real aged cheese, grated fine; pre-grated tubs are drier and saltier and will throw off the salt.
- Keep it looseThe tablespoonful of milk is there to keep the purée slack enough to rise. If your potatoes are especially floury, a little more milk is better than a stiff mixture that sets before it lifts.
- YieldSix halves — three potatoes — serve three as a side dish or two as a light supper with a salad. Serve straight from the oven; the puff falls within a few minutes.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion — which may help explain why so many of its dishes are frugal, potato-heavy and built to feed a household from little. Belgium's attachment to the potato needs no argument; it is generally thought to have reached the Low Countries somewhere between the late sixteenth and the eighteenth century, spreading unevenly, and by the nineteenth was the backbone of working-class cooking there, fried, mashed and stewed. This particular treatment can be set alongside the potato soufflés and pommes de terre farcies that turn up in French and Belgian bourgeois cookery, where the stiffly beaten white was often used to make a cheap starch look like a dinner-party dish. The recipe opens with a boast: a quarter of an hour, once the potatoes are baked.